Bahrain to mark Dilmun civilisation discovery next year

Bahrain is planning unprecedented five-day activities to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Dilmun civilisation next year, a senior official said.

The golden jubilee celebrations will start on November 27, 2004, with an exhibition displaying documents and pictures of the Dilmun period from the archives of the Moesguard Museum in Denmark, assistant undersecretary of culture and national heritage, Sheikha Mai Al Khalifa said. The documents were collected by the Danish expedition team during 1953 and 1954.

The celebrations will be held under the patronage of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

"In addition to a special concert, there will be a three-day conference on the Dilmun period and the related settlement," Sheikha Mai said.

The conference will be held from November 29 to December 1. Other programmes will be held at the Bahrain Fort, Bahrain most prominent historical site.

"The discovery of the Dilmun civilisation was significant locally as well as internationally," she said. "Through the golden jubilee celebration, we are reviving the importance of this archaeological discovery." Before 1954, the Dilmun civilisation was unheard of, she said.

According to archeologists, Dilmun was an influential civilisation based in Bahrain and the Arabian Gulf. It provided a major trade route in the ancient world. It is also the meeting point for Mesopotamia.

"The first time when Dilmun was mentioned before its discovery was in 1953 when Geoffrey Bibby visited Bahrain for the first time as an employee of one of the oil companies," noted Sheikha Mai.

"As Bibby walked around the lands of Bahrain, he was struck by a strange site, large quantities of mounds of equal size in all directions across a very large area."

Bibby returned to his colleagues in Aarhus, Denmark, where they began to study the site. To them, Bahrain was not more than a large historical burial place for the dead from neighbouring areas in ancient and subsequent historical times, she said.

"The turning point was when a leading archaeologist, BF Globe, made a challenging claim that Bahrain was the centre of a special civilisation different from other nearby civilisations.

"Globe claimed that burial grounds were used to bury the people of that civilisation. He argued the traces of Dilmun capital, villages and temples must be located beside these burial grounds somewhere on the land of Bahrain."

Globe and Bibby, formed the first Danish scientific archaeological expedition, the first of its type to reach the area in search of Dilmun.

"The expedition took time to complete the excavation work in Bahrain and its neighbouring countries to uncover the 5,000-year-old civilisation," she said. "Dilmun was different from other civilisations. It had burial mounds, round seals and red pottery," she said.

The most important sites discovered so far are the archaeological Bahrain Fort, where the team had uncovered seven levels of archaeological towns; the Barbar temples, where they uncovered three levels of temples, the Deraz, where they uncovered an ancient Dilmun village; and Al A'ali burial mounds, explained Abdul Rahman Mesameh, director of Bahrain National Museum.

"The golden jubilee aims to boost archaeological awareness among the residents and encourage research on the topic," he said.